U.S. law enforcement needs a single, articulated national strategy to counter the Venezuelan terrorist gang Tren de Aragua, José Gustavo Arocha, national security expert at the Center for a Secure Free Society (SFS), told Breitbart News.
“Such a strategy could bring together the unique strengths of DHS-HSI, FBI, DEA, Treasury/OFAC, the Department of State’s Counterterrorism Bureau, U.S. Southern Command, and the Department of War under common direction from the National Security Council, perhaps through a dedicated TdA Fusion Center,” Arocha told Breitbart News.
“A synchronized approach that respectfully leverages America’s full range of diplomatic, financial, intelligence, military, and law-enforcement capabilities would enable the United States to degrade Tren de Aragua’s franchise model faster than the gang can regenerate it,” he explained.
Last week, SFS released a report authored by Arocha titled, “Weaponized Chaos: The Rise of Tren de Aragua as Venezuela’s Proxy Force, 2014-2025.” The report contains a comprehensive and detailed account of how Tren de Aragua — a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) and Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) — went from a local prison gang in Venezuela to a full blown transnational crime syndicate with an active presence in the United States and at least 11 Latin American countries.
Most alarmingly, the report also details how Tren de Aragua became a “paramilitary instrument” of Venezuela’s socialist regime and how it operates under an “insurgent archipelago” system of semiautonomous cells that can rapidly regenerate once law enforcement strikes a cell.
“The United States has long demonstrated global leadership in confronting hybrid threats, and Tren de Aragua (TdA) now presents one of the most serious such challenges in the hemisphere. Our report respectfully suggests that the current agency-by-agency approach, while valiant, may benefit from greater unity of effort,” Arocha said.
“A single, clearly articulated national strategy, one that views TdA not merely as a transnational criminal organization but as a capable proxy of the Maduro regime, could enable a more effective and coordinated response,” he continued.
The report details how Tren de Aragua was able to turn the Tocorón prison, located in the Venezuelan state of Aragua, into its main headquarters and base of operations thanks to the institutionalization of pranato (“Pranate”), a feudal-esque prison gang system that flourished under the lenient prison policies of dictator Nicolás Maduro. This allowed the gang to turn the prison into a “quasi-military” enclave full of amenities such as nightclubs, zoo, and swimming pools, but also with armories and a networked command post.
“This state-enabled ecosystem allowed TdA to professionalize, franchise, and, by 2021, operate transnationally in ways that blur the line between organized crime and politically motivated subversion,” the report read.
Arocha explained to Breitbart News that by exporting the pranato system to jails in Brazil, Peru, and Chile, Tren de Aragua has gained the ability to rebuild its ranks by turning the prisons into recruitment hubs and operational bases — often by striking pacts with other gangs such as a cocaine transport deal with Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC).
“To prevent Tren de Aragua from continuing to regenerate inside Latin America’s prisons, the region must treat the gang as a state-sponsored asymmetric threat rather than a conventional criminal group,” Arocha told Breitbart News.
Arocha detailed that such action would require a “simultaneous, four-pronged strategy” composed of targeted Magnitsky-style sanctions on prison directors, wardens, and Venezuelan officers who enable the pranato system. He also suggested permanent joint task forces linking Latin American nations and Interpol with shared biometric databases, financial intelligence, and expedited extraditions. He also called for aggressive financial disruption and the physical hardening of the prisons themselves.
“Only by attacking all four fronts at the same time can Latin America break TdA’s ability to resurrect itself after every raid or arrest,” Arocha stressed.
“The fight is not against a gang; it is against an adaptive living system. To defeat it, the system itself must be collapsed from every direction at once. That and only that is the key to victory,” he emphasized.
The Maduro regime has repeatedly claimed that Tren de Aragua “does not exist” since Venezuelan law enforcement officials “raided” the Tocorón prison in September 2023. The “raid” on Tocorón was part of a broader purported security operation that saw the Venezuelan regime empty other prisons in the country. The SFS report states that the “raid” was billed as the “definitive blow against Tren de Aragua,” but that it instead became a “state-orchestrated dispersal.”
“This narrative crumbles under scrutiny: prison officials tipped off pranes in advance, enabling the exfiltration of cash, weapons, and leaders like [Tren de Aragua leader] Niño Guerrero, who simply dispersed to cells abroad,” Arocha told Breitbart News.
“Far from dismantling the gang, the raid externalized its command structure, making it more agile and harder to target—evidenced by continued operations, from Peru’s February 2025 victim rescues to U.S. arrests in Nashville just months ago,” he continued.
Asked by Breitbart News if the Venezuelan regime’s narrative that the gang was fully “dismantled” after the prison “raid” offered “plausible” deniability with regards to the gang’s continued criminal activities in the U.S. and Latin America, Arocha said that it “absolutely constitutes plausible deniability” for socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro.
“TdA functions as a low-cost proxy aligned with his Guerra de Todo el Pueblo (‘‘War of the Whole People’) doctrine, outsourcing coercion to stay below interstate war thresholds, while the regime provides permissive prisons, ideological cover (framing pranes as “revolutionary soldiers”), and porous borders,” Arocha explained.
“Public denials allow Maduro to feign ignorance even as TdA generates hard currency and sows insecurity in adversary states. High-profile links, like Chilean accusations tying Maduro Regime to the 2024 assassination of Lt. Ronald Ojeda Moreno, further underscore this strategy, but the regime’s ‘judicial cooperation’ offers maintains the veneer,” he continued.
Arocha described the Venezuelan migrant crisis as a “catastrophe deliberately generated and sustained by the Maduro regime in Caracas as both a pressure-relief valve for domestic unrest and a strategic tool of hybrid warfare.” The security expert stressed to Breitbart News that Tren de Aragua has “masterfully” weaponized the Venezuelan migrant crisis as its principal growth engine through actions such as extorting “protection” fees to Venezuelan migrants at every border, forcing people into debt-bondage packages, and using vulnerable migrants as disposable couriers, recruiters, and human shields.
“TdA has cynically turned the Venezuelan migrant, the very person fleeing the Maduro regime’s oppression and economic collapse, into its primary and most tragic victim,” Arocha told Breitbart News, and stressed that “ending the root causes of the exodus in Caracas, whether through genuine political transition, economic stabilization, or the restoration of democratic governance, would substantially degrade TdA’s primary expansion vector.”
“In short, resolving the Caracas-driven crisis would deliver a serious blow to TdA’s growth engine and create a historic window of opportunity, but sustained, aggressive follow-up enforcement, diplomatic isolation of the regime, regional task forces, financial strangulation, and prison hardening would remain indispensable to finish the job,” he emphasized.
“Our report underscores that TdA’s resilience stems from regime patronage, so true containment requires not just tactical wins but strategic isolation of Caracas through sanctions, multilateral coalitions, and exposing pranato ties,” Arocha commented to Breitbart News.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.